Hi Everyone,
Well the other day I'm making a part on my lathe and I'm turning the handles in and out and in and out about 50 times and finally I said screw this! I've built 5 other CNC machines and finally now I'll do my first CNC Lathe. Since I already had 2 stepper motors in stock and a plug and play control box which is portable made out of a Mcmaster hand held tool box there was not much to do except take measurements, order the sprockets and do wiring. Like all my other machines I've built I like the manual/CNC setups the best since I don't have a huge shop and having 2 of everything is expensive. I also decide that since it's not a CNC mill doing round holes I don't have to worry too much about backlash so putting in ball screws would be a waste of time and money for what I need to do. So below are pics of build. Took about 3 days of actually working on it to whip it out. Took a week to get gears. I also installed and index wheel and upgraded the motor with a 3 hp Baldor, VFD control and Sinpo DRO. You'll notice the round black dial in the back of the splash guard between the VFD and the DRO, that is the RPM pot when I have it in manual mode. One other picture you'll see is the end of the new Baldor with a sleeve I had to make to make it work. The Baldor has a .875 dia. shaft the the stock motor had an off the wall .970 if I remember correctly. I bored the pulley to 1.00 and used a 1" x .063 wall aluminum tube to cure that issue. Another nice thing is that the lathe had a nice wiring box with relays in it. I made the VFD get power when you use the stock on/off handle on the carriage. Then in the wiring box there was contractor set open that was normally open circuit so I put the e-stop circuit through this so when you hit the lathe e-stop it opens the breaker and stops Mach3 also. That worked out nicely. The switches and big plug are the control cable from the control box and the 2 switches turn off the X and Z axis for quick zeroing or for manual turning. You need to shut off the motors when your in manual mode as the motors turn into little generators and will put current back into your motor drivers backwards which could be bad news for them. For the Z axis you lock the carriage drive and the Z screw is engaged. Easy peasy.